Thank you, Armin!

Dear Armin,

you have dedicated your life, and your career, to this code base. It is impossible to recount your work in detail, that now spans three decades - beginning during the StarOffice/StarDivision times, continuing with OpenOffice.org, then Apache OpenOffice, then LibreOffice.

On behalf of everyone who benefitted from your feature work, code cleanup, vision, dedication & inspiration, to get nice graphics, excellent usability, and maintainable code into the mess you had inherited: we owe you eternal gratitude, and we thank you for having turned many an area into properly architected, well-working, sometimes even beautiful code!

I’m sure I will miss many bits here, apologies – but it’s too much to list, so here’s just the highlights:

  • reworked svx & draw shapes into something that was not completely buggy
  • converted a code base using ad-hoc 1970-style graphics into using modern primitives, floating-point arithmetic & affine transformations in many places
  • implemented the entirety of the OpenOffice 3D engine & shape support
  • maintained the higher-level graphics stack, as well as the Draw and Impress document cores, for more than 20 years
  • cleaned-up, isolated, then shunted into a separate binary the old StarDivision binary filters, leading a remote team of engineers to help with that on the side (the binfilter project) – thus freeing the rest of the engineers to rid the document models of pointless legacy
  • implemented drawing layer primitives, a scene-graph approach to graphics, in an almost two-decade project, and kept iteratively migrating the LibreOffice applications to use that (while keeping everything well-oiled & working all the time)
  • re-architected the fundamental data structures powering LibreOffice’s document models, and the semantics of attributes, styles & formatting (SfxItemSet)
  • led the work implementing proper SmartArt support for LibreOffice, based on the oox code, but massaging & transforming it, so it could be used live, from the document models

Thanks a million, and it is an honour, and a great pleasure, to work alongside with you for so many years!

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